Heartland on education: they’d like to teach the world to lie

This is the Climate Reality Project‘s response to plans by the Heartland Institute to create a “Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Schools” in the USA that “isn’t alarmist or overtly political”, as revealed in the recently leaked documents. Heartland wants to “teach the controversy” about global warming, and has budgeted US$200,000 for the project. The CRP video is very effective, but if you think that Climate Reality might be slightly over-egging the pudding — that perhaps even Heartland wouldn’t go that far — then have I got news for you. The indomitable John Mashey has released a special report on Heartland’s history of attempts to get its distortions of climate science taught in schools — he’s dubbed it Fakeducation — and it stretches back over a decade.

In an attempt to counter the success of An Inconvenient Truth, Heartland released a DVD called Global Warming: Emerging Science and Understanding, together with supporting teaching materials, and a web site: globalwarmingclassroom.info. There’s a trailer for the DVD here, and further excerpts available here. They are remarkable for cramming just about every item in the climate crank catechism of cliché into just a few minutes, but it’s the teaching materials that I find most interesting. Virtually nothing in them is true. In fact, you could argue that Heartland was aiming to teach children to lie.

Take a look at the first “lesson plan” designed to accompany the DVD. These are the lesson goals:

Students know the different atmospheric gases that absorb the Earth’s thermal radiation and the mechanism and significance of the greenhouse effect.

The students will learn how the earth’s temperature is highly variable and that it has been stable or declining in recent years while carbon dioxide continues to increase.

The student’s will learn that temperature precedes change’s in carbon dioxide, not the other way around as previously thought.

The students will learn that when all of the emerging science is considered, man-caused global warming is not a forgone conclusion agreed upon by all scientists. There is great debate within the scientific community.

Also in lesson one:

Massive Data Fraud in NOAA and NASA: […] The data used by NOAA and NASA is shown to have excluded temperature data from northern latitudes and high elevations since 1980 which automatically shows greatly increased temperatures that supposedly shows great man-caused global warming. Also discusses Britain’s Climate Research Unit’s (CRU) massive data manipulation called Climategate.

Oh really? Does systematic libel of scientific organisations really belong in the classroom?

The list of “discussion questions” to be raised after viewing the video is frankly amazing. Everyone knows that deniers are obsessed with hockey sticks, but this is what Heartland wanted the children of North America to learn:

MBH98 or “The Hockey Stick Curve” is widely used by environmentalists and the United Nations to support global warming, but the paper was never audited by peers. Why is it important for research to be audited by peers?Auditing holds people accountable for their work and looks for errors. Simple errors can cause data to be wrong and lead to false assumptions. Tragically, many of these scientists will not allow other scientists to look at their data. That is what happened with the Hockey Stick Curve controversy.

MBH98 never “audited by peers”? Presumably they mean that Monckton has never read it…

Lesson plan two, is if anything, even worse. Here are the learning goals:

Students will learn that most scientists agree that policy should be based upon empirical, scientific evidence and not on political agendas.

The students will learn that the United Nations’ IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a political body and not a scientific one. And they will learn that the “Summary for Policy Makers” published by the IPCC was actually written months before the actual document. Furthermore, that in writing the Summary, available scientific evidence was ignored when it contradicted the agenda of the Panel.

Students will learn that General Circulation Models, GCM’s, are not reliable because the actual climate systems that they attempt to calculate and simulate are far too complex.

Students will learn that because of the complexities of the earth’s climate, the patterns generated by the GCM’s do not always line up with the actual observed climate patterns. The “fingerprints” don’t match.

And once more the “discussion” section is packed with falsehoods. Here’s a question about the IPCC’s Summary For Policmakers:

When is the summary issued? When is the document issued?It is written before the actual document that the scientists write. It is published months before the body of the document is written.

Which is, of course, completely untrue.

Given the tenuous relationship between reality and what Heartland thought the kids of America should know about climate science, it’s perhaps not surprising that in the leaked Heartland “fundraising” document, the lobby group laments that its previous attempts to infiltrate schools “had only limited success.”

Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. Moreover, material for classroom use must be carefully written to meet curriculum guidelines…

Of course, reality has a well known liberal bias. That’s why Heartland’s new curriculum project is going to set them back US$200,000. They’re going to have to be just a tad more subtle than last time, not least because now the whole world’s watching.

[Blearggh – for all sorts of reasons, most of them having to do with good taste.]

A lie repeated again and again will eventually be thought to be true…
When again did we have that sort of propaganda before in our history? This is right out of the textbooks written by demagogues such as Goebbels, or from the propaganda handbooks of the communist movements….
And indeed, a puke bucket would be handy when contemplating what the right wing conspirators in the USA are really up to and what damage they cause already in their present day effect on the hearts and minds of large part of perhaps still the most powerful nation on the planet and the according risks towards the distortion of the democratic process and the outcome of American policies…

1) These libertarian lobbytanks are doing what they do to protect the 1% plutocracy that favours the status quo (because, as James Bond would say, the world is not enough).
2) Well-meaning skeptics are being deceived and used by professional skeptics who are making a lot of money out of this.

#2 is right, except that I’m not sure that “professional septics” are making a lot of money. Making some money, sure, but not fistfuls of dollars. Ideology is its own reward.
If anything, Heartland’s greatest achievement has been to marshall deniers from all over the world, putting them in conferences together, and the work they’ve done to make the resulting networks more efficient. That’s been relatively cheap, because it relies on the free noise generated by the willing deluded. It also puts their credibility at risk, because they are relying on cranks for material — as these teaching notes prove so well.

If you see what Idso and Singer get out of just one of a dozen think tanks, I wouldn’t call that peanuts. At least, it isn’t to me. What Carter gets, is already more than a third that I make for 60-70 hour working weeks.

Not all payment is in money.
1) Some Nth rate scientists do make some money they could not make, apparently, in any honest way.

2) Some others (especially the long has-beens or new wannabes) are probably thrilled that someone asks them to be listed as expert, maybe even get invited to speak at a Heartland ICCC and maybe pay their travel costs. Maybe newspapers actually ask them for quotes.
See Reasons.

Actually, most of these amounts are not very big* but they are *very* efficient and even tax-efficient, saving more money for lobbying.

*scales always differ, and more relevant might be value/cost.
I’ve run $4M yearly budgets myself and been involved in key ways in multiple business deals worth $10Ms per year. Of course, there was actually productive work happening.

AndyS: The NZ curriculum is not a Syllabus. It is an overarching document outlining the broad aims and objectives.
Schools and teachers have a great degree of freedom to interpret the Curriculum as they see fit.

In the high school years much of the “enacted” curriculum is determined by the NCEA subjects and exam papers and their content as created by the NZQA. You will find a host of Achievement standards there for which credits can be gained. Check the Science section perhaps.

Science teachers will certainly address the topic of climate change in their classes in conjunction with the appropriate subject matter.

“Now let me guess, plonking kids in front of “An Inconvenient Truth” is what you regard as “education”” – In which case the students would almost certain fail to meet the achievement standards set.

You obviously have as much understanding of modern education as does Wojick and HI.
The HI material would never match up to what is required – simply because it fails the first quality test. “Can you honestly hold it as a valid option” ie does it stack up against what we know about the world.

To be a science teacher in a NZ secondary school, one has to have at the very least a bachelors degree with a major in a relevant science discipline and a minor in a supporting subject (Say a Major in Chemistry, and a minor in Earth Sciences) – followed by a post-graduate year of academic study and practice in the disciplines one is intending to teach. With such an academic background, one would hardly expect a Science teacher to choose to use the rubbish published by HI.
It would depend on the nature of the unit to be studied whether or not one would use a video. Certainly the video would be background and placing the topic in context rather than the main focus of the study.

Actually, given the claims made about the IPCC by our resident Denier cohort, and their associated monumental ignorance of its actual make up and function I’d say they’ve already been taking this course!

This kind of ignorance can also give, say, The Raspberry Woman a nice trade in producing yet more made-to-order chum to throw into the trough for an un-choosy audience ready and willing to digest virtually anything!

And if you think I’m exaggerating, look here, and follow the further link that demonstrates that, say, Andy S has been running a small cottage industry for years in criticising an organization he knows next-to-nothing about and whose reports he clearly hasn’t read, unless safely pre-filtered by The Weatherman, The Sticky Bishop, and The Raspberry Woman of course! (A kind of Readers Undigested condensed version, if you will…)

Anybody’s who’s reading this, and is somehow thinking that they, too, might like to credit that the IPCC is a Marxist plot coordinated by Greenpeace, the WWF, and a handful psychically-scarred teenagers; well, you too, are a fool, and fully deserve your fate. The problem is the rest of us don’t.

5. What happened to the earth’s temperature in 2007?
– In 2007 the earth’s temperature dropped ½ degree Celsius or 0.9 of a degree Fahrenheit even though CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) has increased at a steady rate. If CO2 is the reason 14 for Global warming why hasn’t the earth’s temperature continued to increase each year along with the CO2 levels?

They must be talking about monthly changes here, but monthly changes of that magnitude are common (both up and down).

In a real sense the whole thing is insulting to anyone who creates K-12 curricula. Let alone the science, Wojick and HI know nothing about teaching in elementary and secondary schools.

First the initial target audience is teachers, with their strengths and weaknesses. Mom Rabett was the last of the first grade dragons who could teach a stone to read and kill off the new math. Moreover there is very limited time to teach science in most years, the HI nonsense is way too time consuming.

Second, there are real national standards in science and everything else, which devolve down to state curricula in the US. Any curriculum proposal has to first deal with how it meets these and it has to take a minimum of time.

If there is a target group for the Wojick nonsense, it is the religious and libertarian home schoolers, and the wingnut school board members, and frankly they do not need to learn how to be more confused. They got that.

I’d dearly like someone to pay me $5000 per “module” for producing something as easy as this. When you look at the learning objectives, there’s not a lot of work in getting together the material. It just comes straight from the whackaloonacy infesting your mind. No need to worry about research or checking that your material’s up to date or any of that teachery malarkey.

There he pontificates in his perhaps most outrageous writ yet to the people of our land. His Heartland Institute paymasters must have been so pleased with him and his public disinformation campaign. Perhaps he gets a pay rise?

The article is so completely full of nonsense and lies that one wonders indeed how on Earth the NZ Herald could let this pass. Do they do any fact checking on the tripe they publish?

Its time I think that somebody takes the Herald seriously to task over this. Publishing the biggest newspaper in NZ is an undertaking in public education and carries the responsibility of at least being factually defensible. Knowingly allowing a lobbyist who had been retained by the secretive US Heartland Institute to spread the ultra-right wing propaganda of this “Dumb Tank” to the people of New Zealand is simply beyond reproach.

There he pontificates in his perhaps most outrageous writ yet to the people of our land.
In the absence of any description or argument, we’ll just have to take your word for it Thomas.
You are right, he is wrong.
No other explanation is necessary

No AndyS, turning on your brain and reference to fact not fiction might actually assist you to perhaps concur with my view. However just as nobody will change a Pentecostal young Earther’s view on Evolution and the geological record of our planet and the universe, so will sense and science fail to convince the die-hard libertarians….
And AndyS, its rather amusing indeed that you among all people should call upon Scientific Literacy in your Herald comment on Leyland’s article don’t you think?

Sorry, I thought from previous comments here that you had some idea were I am coming from.

To sum it up: We are currently on a high speed collision course between our growth predicated resource hungry economies and the one planet reality we find ourselves in.
In order to keep on growing exponentially we would need “Star Trek” like technology allowing us to dig into other planets resources about now, but sorry, its not going to happen.

Already our ecological footprint is exceeding what we can sustainably extract with many resources getting harder to come by as the low hanging fruits on the “apple tree” have been taken, we will be caught between rising demands and falling returns from our “mining paradigm” existence.

I believe that our only hope for a civilized future is a rapid evolution of sustainable economic and ecologic practices. This squarely negates the dream of endless growth. But it might herald a time when we cherish other things than GDP bottom line figures. Go and listen to a talk by Rod Oram perhaps and you will know what I mean.

The long shadow of the “Limits to Growth” study of the Club of Rome is looming large over our current times.

But from the other discussions in this site I can take it as read that nothing I say here will mean much to you other than perhaps function as a red flag to a bull….
(mind the end of the bull …. its never pretty…) 😉

Might I suggest you read Dick Smith’s “Population Crisis” – The dangers of unsustainable growth for Australia.
Just one factor for you to consider –
At the present rate of human population growth we add nearly 80 million extra people to the planet.
By mid century we will require twice as much food and double the energy we use today.
And you remain optimistic that despite peak oil, increasing stress on fresh water supplies, and diminishing fertile land, that we will “will overcome our environmental constraints”! You really are in fairyland.

Most of the population growth in the world is in developing, poor nations. Many western nations are breeding at or below replacement rate.
There is good evidence to suggest that bringing most of the world’s population out of poverty will stabilise population growth.

So I take it from your last comment that you don’t give a toss about those in undeveloped or developing countries.
Nice!
Rather contrary to the crocodile tears you were weeping over the $10 billion spent on something or other just the other day.
Even acknowledging that observation of yours regarding falling NATURAL population rates in developed countries ….
The fact of the matter is that immigration to these countries, over take that, and developed countries such as Australia and NZ still are continuing to grow at unsustainable rates. Especially Australia – I really suggest you read the book.

So I take it from your last comment that you don’t give a toss about those in undeveloped or developing countries.

I don’t know how you draw that conclusion. The Green agenda is one that denies the developing world access to cheap energy. My previous comment about the redistribution of wealth to developing countries via “climate funds” will certainly not make them more wealthy. It will fund a bunch of crony capitalist projects that will make “green entrepreneurs” wealthy,

AndyS: “The Green agenda is one that denies the developing world access to cheap energy.”
Now you are seriously hitting rock bottom don’t you?
The developing world is the first to be cut off from energy supply from fossil fuels etc. due to the fact that these become simply unaffordable for the poor. Instead solar solutions designed to help the poor are now much more affordable to them than Petrol!

Actually andy I tend to put my money where my mouth is.
I would invite others to do the same. 🙂
The bags by the way are extremely popular and I can vouch for the quality of the T’s.
A few hundred dollars can help change a life.

WOW AndyS surpasses himself with his ignorance of what is going on in the real world:

“The Green agenda is one that denies the developing world access to cheap energy.”

If you cared to read some factual articles instead of burying your face in denier tripe you would realize that the developing countries cannot afford your version of cheap energy i.e. $110 per barrel oil.

However, the developing world is leading in low cost green technologies. For example, do a little google search on small scale bio-gas generators. Millions of them are improving both physical and social well being in the developing world, especially India and China. Africa is a leader in green, low cost solar energy.

Anyone who believes one word of what you spout on this blog are as ignorant of what is going on in the real world as you.

I see Mr Forrester has extracted himself from the Denier Swarm thread on DeSmearBlog (where he accuses all and sundry of lying, again) to continue his mouth foaming over here.

I thought you weren’t going to engage with trolls Mr Forrester? After throwing your toys out of the cot recently, you are back. Why?

Remember you accused me of lying because you claimed that NONE of the temperature records showed a hiatus in warming over the last decade, when MOST of them do. You cherry picked one series, GISSTemp, to support your assertion.

So why do you continue to peddle your pseudo-science, Mr Forrester?
Would you like me to chuck a few more Popper or Feynmann quotes in your direction?
Those usually get the junk scientists like you running for cover.

Ian Forrester
Please explain to me where I have been lying. I realise that it is your MO to accuse everyone of lying. So, please explain to me, now please, which information ( as opposed to personal opinion or viewpoints) is untrue.

You lie in just about everything you say on this blog. But to give you an example, here is a lie you told on several occasions on the puppet on a string thread as well as in your previous comment on this thread:

“Remember you accused me of lying because you claimed that NONE of the temperature records showed a hiatus in warming over the last decade, when MOST of them do. You cherry picked one series, GISSTemp, to support your assertion.”

If you go back to my original comment I was talking about 15 years not ten. You repeated that lie a number of times.

Thomas February 28, 2012 at 8:08 pm
Yes I have seen this graph before.
However, you fail to understand the issue.
I was making the claim that according to the Met Office, using HadCrut3 data, there has been little or no warming over the last 15 years.

I was not putting this in the context of the previous 15 years. I was not putting this in the context of the poor Polar Bears. I was not putting this in the context of the “trillions” of tonnes of ice melting.

I was treating this as a standalone problem
Then, Ian Forrester, using the same standalone problem cherry picks a temperature series that supports his assertion, ignores mine, and then accuses me of lying

Furthermore, he accuses me of being a despicable person based on this line of reasoning.

AndyS, you tell lie upon lie. My original point was that there has been warming since 1997, something you deniers want to pretend is not a fact. I presented a link to WFT which showed that I was correct using one of the data bases. You replied that I was wrong because that was the only data base showing a rise ( “You cherry picked one series, GISSTemp, to support your assertion”.). In fact if you look at WFT and examine the other data bases you will find that you lied. Four of the five data sets show increasing temperatures, all be it that HadCrut only shows a slight increase, proving that you lied initially and continually lie to try and CYA.

When will you admit you are wrong? I’m sure everyone, everyone who is not a denier of course, will have looked at the WFT data I cited and will be laughing at what a fool you are making of yourself with your continued efforts to try and show that I lied. You are the liar.

Just to sum up, WFT shows 5 data bases for temperatures, four of which show warming. Only RSS shows a decline. Even the data produced by well known deniers, Christy and Spencer (UAH) and BEST show increasing temperatures.

Gareth, can we turn this AndyS on moderation perhaps. His insults and his persistence on regurgitating the same old falsehoods are simply no longer adding any benefit or interesting perspective to the discussion whatsoever. He is incapable of learning anything.

Your previous question was unanswerable because each school and each teacher develops their own material in accordance with the NZ curriculum and the student’s needs as assessed by the teacher(s). A module taught in one school may not be taught in another. The aim is that at the end of the day (figuratively speaking) the curriculum will have been covered (you have been referred to this document already) and the standards set will have been achieved. That these curriculum goals are being met is regularly assessed by ERO who review every other year (unless they consider they need to more frequently) the teaching. From students books – top middle and bottom in each class and the content of the lessons, the educational goals and the achievement standards required. These are also externally assessed in high school through NZQA examinations, and internal (but externally moderated) assessments. The curriculum is a purposefully open-ended document and a variety of topics may be covered which achieve the same educational outcomes.

One hopes that school science teachers are teaching just that – science. Science is not just “our” material, Andy, its a major part of the human heritage and a priceless gift to our descendants.

What would you deniers teach instead? Nothing but ignorance and subservience to corporate money, power and greed, leading inexorably to a world of weather chaos, forced migration, famine, war and disease…

Again your simplistic approach to this matter clouds your understanding and appreciation of what has been told you several times.
I’ll repeat just this once.
Teachers follow the NZ curriculum which sets out learning goals for each level of a child’s schooling. (You have been referred to the NZ curriculum.) The educative process for each school is monitored by the Education Review Office on a regular basis. Teachers have freedom to develop modules within the framework of the curriculum.
If you have a problem with this I refer you to the minister.

Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change and subsequent 2011 Interim Report along with the monthly Archive of Scientific Literature Reviews should disclose any “lie” HI disseminates. http://nipccreport.org/

February 2012 Archive includes:-

Precipitation within the Waikato Region of New Zealand (1 Feb 2012)

Quoting:-

“According to authors Dravitzki and McGregor (2011), “Trenberth (1999) proposed that globally, extreme precipitation events would account for a larger proportion of annual precipitation as the globe warmed,” as was additionally suggested by Trenberth et al. (2003). And they state that “this is also supported by the fourth IPCC report (IPCC, 2007),” which “expects the change in the intensity of precipitation events to be proportional to changes in total precipitation.”
[…]
In the words of the two New Zealand researchers, “since 1900 there have been no significant variations in the total annual precipitation nor in the occurrence or magnitude of extreme precipitation events,” and they say that these events “were also uncorrelated to the large-scale IPO, ENSO and SAM, indicating that the seasonal probability of extreme precipitation is independent of these circulations.””

Eventually NIPCC will review ‘Global cloud height fluctuations measured by MISR on Terra from 2000 to 2010’, Davies and Molloy 2012. The UofA reports it here:-

“Research from The University of Auckland on changes in cloud height in the decade to 2010 has provided the first hint of a cooling mechanism that may be in play in the Earth’s climate.
[…]A consistent reduction in cloud height would allow the Earth to cool to space more efficiently, reducing the surface temperature of the planet and potentially slowing the effects of global warming. This may represent a “negative feedback” mechanism – a change caused by global warming that works to counteract it.”

These are both NZ papers so any “lie” HI propagated in either of the reviews could easily be confirmed by the authors. Why not start by asking Dravitzki and McGregor if their paper has been accurately reviewed?

Why then is HI’s K-12 Climate Education Project inadmissible when it has not yet been compiled let alone rolled out?

These are 2 not-for-profit groups doing essentially the same thing from different perspectives. If students have sufficient critiquing skills, they will be able to make up their own minds or if not immediately, to do so in the future as time goes by and they observe for themselves.

These are 2 not-for-profit groups doing essentially the same thing from different perspectives.

Utter nonsense. NCSE is a non-partisan group in the US devoted to the defence of the integrity of science education in schools. Heartland is a “liar for hire” lobbying organisation trying to create confusion about climate change by misrepresenting the truth. It’s a telling fact that until recently NCSE was mainly concerned with defending science education from the creationist lobby. They added climate education to their brief as a direct response to the activities of groups like Heartland.

“The mission of The Heartland Institute is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. Such solutions include parental choice in education, choice and personal responsibility in health care, market-based approaches to environmental protection, privatization of public services, and deregulation in areas where property rights and markets do a better job than government bureaucracies.”

Ironically I don’t deny climate change. I happen to think that land use change is a big factor. I just struggle to get to grips with human addition to a trace gas out weighing solar-lunar-celestial forces and cycles and the earth’s own geo forces subject to those also.

That’s just a consequence of CO2 being colourless. Have you ever mixed paint or added food colouring to large quantities of fluid? And for things that are invisible, how about adding a few extra drops of glucose syrup into food- especially into something that’s already as sweet as as you like it?

“solar-lunar-celestial forces and cycles and the earth’s own geo forces subject to those also.” I hope my fellow geologist, Roger, will help set Richard C2 straight on this matter. Roger, Roger, over, Over.

There are certainly elements of climate science’s explanation of climate change that are not supported by the wider scientific community viz astrophysics, geophysics, optic physics, electro-magnetic physics etc.

There’s also the disparity of rigour e.g. if climate science was subject to the same scrutiny as pharmaceutical manufacturers are by the FDA for drug approval, the IPCC would never have got to AR4.

Richard C2, all you are revealing are the depths of your own gullibility and ignorance. I challenge you to back up this nonsense:

“There are certainly elements of climate science’s explanation of climate change that are not supported by the wider scientific community viz astrophysics, geophysics, optic physics, electro-magnetic physics etc.”

Good question AndyS. Let me rephrase it for you a tad:
Question 1) What hope is there that all people, even AndyS, will comprehend the matters of climate change? Answer: None at all.
Question 2) Does it matter? Answer not at all. There will always be cranks in this world, so who cares.

i.e Is “Climate Change” defined as all climatic variability, or is it the bit that may be attributable to human causes. The IPCC and the UNFCCC have different definitions, so a statement like
“All scientists agree about climate change” is a completely meaningless load of twaddle

If this is the starting point of a K12 education programme, not to mention a venting about “deniers” and links to “Skeptical Science” and “Real Climate” as “resources”, then I don’t really think this is any better than the Heartland material.

So that would another lie, then Andy. Rob did not “airbrush” them out, he pointed out that they are not relevant.

Do you have some evidence to the contrary, for example showing that the MWP was a global event that was warmer than today? Or that the causes of the MWP are the same as the causes of the current warming?

I’ve already pointed out to andy the inconsistency of maintaining the actuality of MWP warmer than today, and a low climate sensitivity.

And obviously it is the teacher – teaching in accordance with the goals laid out by the NZ Curriculum and externally monitored by ERO and external assessment who determines if the subject is relevant. Quite frankly one would struggle to find such an occasion to have a lesson on the MWP. It’s more of interest to academics of medieval history, and so called “climate-sceptics”, who quite frankly will grasp at any straw, no matter how futile and inadequate, just so long as they can go on burning their beloved fossil fuels.